Bean There, Done That (Evening Standard)

BEAN THERE, DONE THAT

by Neil Norman

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Sean Bean doesn't come out to play with
the press much. Despite his being a card-carrying Brit movie star
who commands extraordinary fidelity among his legions of female
fans, he doesn't give a lot of interviews. He's been hyped as
the strong, silent type, an unreconstructed male with roots of
Sheffield steel and a no-nonsense attitude to work, women and
football.

This is the guy who has '100% Blade' tattooed
on his shoulder in honour of his football team, Sheffield United;
the man who has been quoted as saying that a woman's place is
at home in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant) while the man goes
out to work. He's a 21st-century Hunter/Gatherer, a Bloke of Blokes,
a Northern Lad as opposed to a Southern Geezer. A thrice-married
rogue and a scallywag with the ladies. He's certainly everybody's
favourite bit of rough on screen - Mellors in Lady Chatterley,
the archetypal James Bond villain, Sharpe, the hero of the Napoleonic
Wars.

Some have suggested that he may not be the
sharpest knife in the drawer, but this is a cheap shot. The trouble
is - due largely to his own reticence - very few people have actually
talked to him at any great length.

One thing is 100 per cent certain: he doesn't
play the showbiz game. One gets the impression he would rather
sit in a fridge and stick lollysticks in his eyes than sit down
and talk to a journalist. This is something he is trying to change.
'I haven't courted publicity in the past,' he says. 'I suppose
you could put it down to a natural reticence. The more you put
yourself in the spotlight, the more you get examined. Not that
I've got anything to be ashamed of. I'm not really putting myself
on chat shows just to raise my profile. I find it a little strange
talking about myself all the time. I'm getting better at it because
now it's so much a part of the job.'

Acting is a job for Bean, but it's not just
any job. It's The Job, and he treats it with respect. He's done
a number of other, lesser jobs in the past - he's been an apprentice
welder, a snow shoveller and a cheese porter in Marks & Spencer
- a job that famously lasted one entire morning.

But this job has sent him to some far-flung
worlds, from the Ukraine for Sharpe, to Paris for Ronin and most
recently, into Middle-earth for Lord of the Rings. Bean plays
Boromir, one of the few human characters in Tolkien's fantastical
saga of hobbits and orcs, elves and a miscellany of mythical creatures.
Was Bean a Tolkien fan before he was cast in the role? 'I read
it about 15 or 16 years ago,' he says. 'I've always been interested
in mythology, but it is quite a dense read. It's one of those
books that you have to keep referring back to in order to find
out who's who and who is related to who. But you don't get a great
deal from Boromir in the book; [director Peter] Jackson's imagination
is quite off-kilter, he brings something quite fresh to the story.'

Lord of the Rings marks a departure for
Bean in more ways than one; it is the first time in a career typified
by realistic characters (from an IRA terrorist in Patriot Games
to SAS man in Bravo Two Zero) that he has played in a full-blown
fantasy. The fact that Boromir is not himself a fantastical character
clearly helped him with the characterisation. 'He is a valiant
warrior,' Bean explains. 'A very practical man whose family has
been deteriorating as a result of the war, but he also has a vulnerable
quality. It was quite good fun for me playing Boromir because
he is a practical man, and you'd see these elves and weird people
walking around and you'd think, "F***ing hell, where does
he fit in?" That reaction definitely helped with my character.'

Working on a movie involving special effects
on a grand scale brought additional problems. Quite apart from
the daily chore of having to run from the main set to the second
unit and then trot over to an empty space for blue-screen work,
Bean's sense of unreality was heightened in other ways. 'There
were some funny times,' he recalls with a crooked smile. 'These
little guys standing in for Frodo and the hobbits had to wear
a blue sock with yellow balls on their faces. The actor's face
would then be superimposed on it afterwards. But you'd be talking
to a blue sock.'

This is not the sort of thing they warn
you about at drama school, I'd imagine. Especially at RADA, where
Bean spent three years learning his craft.

Sitting in a photographic studio in jeans,
boots and a fairly horrible tan fleece jacket, Bean still looks
like a working-class drama student. Now 42, he exhibits few of
the pretensions or egocentricities typical of many of his contemporaries.
He is a reluctant interviewee, a cautious talker whose reticence
appears 100 per cent genuine. He thinks long and hard before answering
each question, leading some interrogators to assume that he is
inarticulate, even dumb. While it's true that he sometimes shows
signs of an unusually unreliable memory (on a recent television
appearance he forgot the name of the character he was playing
in Lord of the Rings), I suspect this is due more to a vague sense
of panic that grips him on such occasions, than to a lack of brain
cells. He is simply not used to playing the publicity game and
therefore does not have the ready ammunition of soundbites to
deliver with glib precision.

Bean grew up in Handsworth, a working-class
suburb of Sheffield. His mother was a secretary and his father
a steelworker. He left school at 16 with two O levels (Art and
English) and a vague idea that he wanted to be an artist, before
he drifted into work as an apprentice to his father. In between
work and football, playing the piano and guitar, he kept painting,
and exhibited his work in a Sheffield art-shop window.

'Drawing or painting was what I really wanted
to do. I thought I'd become a commercial artist and then move
on. I went to a few art schools but couldn't really hack it. I
worked for my dad for about three or four years and then went
to technical college in Rotherham where I learned about steel
and composites. Right next to it was an art and drama college,
and I enrolled on the art course.'

In between lessons, he used to peer through
the door of the drama classes, and found himself drawn towards
the discipline. After a while, he switched courses from art to
drama, and knew he had finally discovered his vocation. 'I felt
really secure and comfortable in it. It seemed to combine everything
I was interested in from music to art.'

After a year on the drama course he applied
to RADA and was accepted. 'I felt like an outsider for about six
months, but that was more to do with London than RADA,' he says.
'It was quite a shock to the system. Until then I'd used to come
down with me mates for Bowie concerts, then go straight back up.'

Bean was at RADA at exactly the right time
for his particular style of acting. Standard English was being
taught for classic texts but not at the expense of regional accents.
He was encouraged to maintain his Sheffield accent and can now
shift gamely between the regions of the United Kingdom, or deliver
an acceptable received pronunciation if the occasion demands.

His cites Albert Finney, Richard Harris,
Peter O'Toole and Tom Courtenay as role models. 'They were my
sort of heroes. And it's come back to that, thank God. Look at
Russell Crowe in Gladiator. And I loved Albert Finney in Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning. These guys are real men and probably
politically incorrect, but they were totally the truth. I watched
Richard Harris in This Sporting Life and when I worked with him
[in The Field] he didn't disappoint me. I used to remember watching
these films growing up in Sheffield. They were real to me. Finney
shooting that fat woman up the arse with an air rifle in Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning. It was like life. When I went to drama
school, these were the images I carried with me.'

Given his rough-hewn machismo and the robustness
of his role models, it is supremely ironic that his first movie
should have been Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, in which he played
the painter's male lover. Bean can laugh at the irony of his situation
in retrospect, though he admits to shutting his eyes at the time.

'Yeah, it was quite weird,' he laughs. 'You
couldn't make a film with Derek and not feel weird. He was so
extraordinary. I was very new to the business and my first film
was with Derek Jarman - a real artist making a film about a real
artist. He just let you do what you want. I went to meet him in
his flat in Charing Cross Road and he asked me about my home life
and football and stuff like that. He was interested in the reality
of my background in Sheffield. I was playing Caravaggio's loverÉ
but I didn't really think about that too much. I just wanted to
work with great people and he was a great person.'

Bean's defining moment came in 1992 when
he was cast as the Peninsular War hero Richard Sharpe, after first
choice Paul McGann suffered a leg injury and had to drop out.
Flukes don't get much luckier and Bean took the opportunity and
the role and bent it to his will. The result was a hugely popular
historical swashbuckling telly drama that lasted for five seasons.

'There's still talk about a feature film,'
he says with caution. 'I love the Napoleonic Wars. I remember
having a big board and spraying it green and putting little trees
and Airfix men on to make massive armies to play with. The Battle
of Waterloo capped the series but we could go back a bit. There
is plenty of material to explore.'

There are stories about Bean's past - including
a punch-up for which he was fined £50 for actual bodily
harm, and a somewhat unreconstructed way with women - but no real
scandals. He has been married three times and has three daughters,
two by his second wife Melanie Hill and one by his third, Abigail
Cruttenden, from whom he is now divorced.

At the time of his break-up with Hill, in
particular, Bean came under some heavy flak for his attitude to
women. Does he have any regrets about that? 'It was crazy, really,'
he says, fidgeting slightly. 'It was blown out of all proportion.
Then again you should be able to say what you feel. You have to
be yourself and say what you are and I'd rather take that risk
than pander to people.'

He maintains a complicated but solid relationship
with his daughters, in spite of the fact that he is away from
home a lot. 'It's a matter of time. When you do have the time
at home, you have to make it as good as possible. My family and
my kids understand that. I think it's important to keep a strong
link. You might spend three months away but then you follow it
with three months at home, so it balances out.'

Given the fact that he has maintained his
status as a British heart-throb and yet is clearly a bloke who
likes family life with all that it entails, I wonder whether he
might marry again. He pauses, lights a cigarette, fidgets some
more.

'At the present moment in time, no,' he
eventually says. 'But I wouldn't say I'd never get married again.
I could, yeah. I don't look back on those experiences with any
bitterness. I think of the good times.'

A positive attitude to life. A solid career.
And the admiration of thousands of women. A working-class hero
is something to be.